Every morning I drive my daughter to school, and every morning we deal with the road work on Hwy. 11 as we motor up the hill toward Kea‘au. It’s been going on at least since before her July summer program at the school.
To the construction company’s credit, they have been keeping the road open (at least during the morning rush hour; I don’t know about the rest of the day), though it does slow and narrow to one lane at places. It could be worse.
But it’s never fun to drive …

I wrote about vog recently and the article is out in the current (August 2009) Honolulu magazine.
Here’s how it starts:
It comes on the Kona winds—the dreaded yellow-brown haze of vog that makes eyes burn and lungs protest. On the Big Island, of course, it has done far more damage. How bad could it get? And what do we really know about vog and its effects?
Three-thousand, eight-hundred people lived on Miyakejima, a small island off Tokyo, until one day in September 2000, when the Japanese government ordered the island evacuated because …

Oh my, how fun to read.
From the New York Times:
Poetry in Motion
By DANNY HEITMAN
Published: August 15, 2009

Baton Rouge, La.
IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry?
The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate…. (Read the rest here.)
Imagine, Ford Motor Company called up the poet Marianne …